Nature Futures, page 27
“Rosebud,” I said, kissing her on the nose.
“You’d better not, anyway,” she said. “And don’t forget to watch the road.”
In fact, I could hardly take my eyes off it. The castle was an eye-magnet. More Transylvania than California. More Dracula than Disneyland. Although it did have that Anaheim aesthetic, plunked down in the middle of Big Sur. The landscape of America. The landscape of nowhere. A history of architecture in one building. NeoGothic PostColonial Revisionism. The art nouveau of wretched excess. Pediments and gables. Towers and balconies. Dormers, cornices, columns. Spires and gargoyles. Things that go bump in the night. The world’s biggest and most expensive crypt improbably placed far from graveyards or amusement parks.
Vampire Kane.
“What if he’s still alive?” I asked.
“You’re crazy.”
“No, really—what if he’s not allowed to die, or refused to go gently into that good night, as they say, until he’s seen everything he’s collected, played with all his toys, read all the books, seen all the films, tried on every single suit, laced up and slipped on every pair of shoes?”
She sighed and shook her head.
“It’s quite possible,” I insisted. “The miracles of modern medicine and all.”
She looked away suddenly and stared intently out of the window.
The wrong thing to say after reproductive technology recently let us down. But it was true, theoretically. Cellular immortality, thanks to telomerase. Keeps the DNA from getting frayed, like the ends of an old rope. So the cells can divide over and over and over again, with no defects. A genetic photocopier with amazing resolution.
Not yet available at a hospital near you. Not yet. But they already sell spare parts now, hearts and lungs, kidneys and livers, grown up from embryos, fetal tissue, skin scraped off the tip of your own nose. They have waiting lists, but it’s amazing what a little cash can do. Bump you up to the front of the line. Strictly hush-hush money, of course. Especially if you’re already supposed to be dead, not just going through desperate measures to fend it off due to vanity and insecurity. Although that probably has something to do with it. Along with the ability to do it.
Why climb Mount Everest? Because it is there.
Why live forever? Because you can.
A tune-up every hundred thousand miles or every ten years, whatever comes first. The money’s in the bank, the check’s in the post. Synthetic joints, artificial cheekbones, stainless-steel supports, rack-and-pinion steering. Gives “a new lease of life” a whole new meaning.
Just call in the docs whenever necessary and nip and cut and bait and switch and presto! A whole new circulatory system! Nanotube technology, brimming with synthetic blood. Or maybe a new skin. After a few months of healing (what are a few months when you’ve got forever?) unwrap the gauze and remove the IV drip and take a look around the pharaoh’s tomb, somewhere deep within the bowels. Then throw the bandages aside and start taking stock.
I can picture him, appearing from some nook after the last tourist has left, slipping the guard a Benjamin from his unlimited supply. He’d have to read the newspaper first. A Hearst publication, of course. Then the competition’s.
Then all his press clippings of the day. Everything germane to the company. Which is pretty much everything. But that’s the way it goes when you’ve got a multinational, horizontal conglomerate. Everything connects to everything else, somehow. Everything is relevant.
By the time he has processed all the day’s news, he will sense the sun rising, take a quick peek at some crated work of art, some great hidden Picasso, maybe, sigh, then disappear for the day. He’d never be done. He’d barely ever even get started. Maybe he still controls his empire. By proxy. By secret decree. Maybe there’s a series of Venn diagrams in a safe somewhere covering every possible decision. Or flow charts. Marching orders. Battle plans. It can’t be that hard, anyway. Buy. Build. Expand. Conquer. People do it every day. They have their names on buildings to prove it.
A Man of the Theater
NORMAN SPINRAD
Norman Spinrad graduated from the City College of New York as a pre-law major. An author of many novels, perhaps the most notorious is Bug Jack Barron, serialized in the British magazine New Worlds during Michael Moorcock’s editorship. Its explicit language and cynicism toward politicians incurred the wrath of a British member of Parliament who objected to the magazine’s partial funding from the British Arts Council. Spinrad now lives in Paris.
I’ve been a man of the theater for over a century. Old enough to have played Hamlet, and Richard, and any number of Henries, and Lear before my first rejuvenation—and all in my own flesh and on the stage, not as an avatar, licensed or otherwise.
You remember the theater, don’t you?
Of course you don’t. There hasn’t been a play produced in what, a quarter of a century. In what I call a play, the characters must be played by live actors, not software emulations of the dead greats of yesteryear, who never played the parts themselves—and certainly not by one of myself.
And not because I could not compete with these pathetic avatars. Most of the roles in realies are played by the greats of the past, but because they all died before fleshware downloading technology was available, they’ve all been synthesized from old footage by the entertainment conglomerates that owned the rights, and they walk mechanically through the roles like the virtual robots they are, not even the virtual ghosts of true thespians.
What is more, I was offered an emulation contract many long years ago, which I scornfully turned down. Yes, I was that good. Good enough that they were willing to pay me royalties for the use of my avatar, even though they had a free casting call from over a century of film and television. But I would not betray the theater for any amount of money.
The theater, they declare, is obsolete. Why would anyone pay money to watch third-rate human actors staggering around on a platform in front of a flat painted set when they can tap into full virtual realies telling the same story, if it’s any good, with smell, and taste, and touch, and pleasure-center stimulation, within a fully realized world that can be synthesized as cheaply as theatrical sets? And to reach what demographics? A few thousand people a day when the same budget creates a hit machine tapped by scores of millions!
The theater is dead.
But the theater must not die. Those who do not understand why have never set foot on a stage before a live audience. I may be the last man alive who has. You have not seen those shining eyes beyond the footlights riveted on you; you have not smelled the heady aroma of an expectant live audience. Yes, I know, if there was any interest in such ancient history, you could experience it in a realie. Or so you believe.
But the magic of the theater cannot be emulated: the intimate connection between the human actor and a live audience. For when the play succeeds, there is a collaboration between the actors and the audience—the actors and the audience live and breathe together, a community of the spirit in which the reaction of the audience influences the actors and shapes the live audience’s experience itself. A positive feedback loop, as you moderns would so unromantically have it.
If the popular “entertainments” that fill so many broadcast hours are all soulless exercises, with none of the drama acted out by fellow humans in the intimacy of a living community, life itself will be entirely reduced to virtuality. Has it not already happened in the retirement heavens, where zombies are tapped into a thousand available channels of realies, twenty-four hours a day? The life-support technology already exists and it only awaits a profitable business model for the entire population of the planet to dream their lives away as the solipsistic gods of their perpetual virtual heavens.
This is neither drama nor life. This is tyranny with an entertaining face. If the theater dies, so dies the human spirit. For only a great act of theater can reawaken it.
Antonin Artaud wrote of the Theater of Cruelty: do not amuse your audience. Be cruel to your audience in order to seize and hold it. I shall go him one further.
The King will be parading from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament in his magnificently baroque horse-drawn carriage and in full costume, like the penultimate actor that he is, his simple performance witnessed live by throngs gathered along the way to experience the Royal Presence at first hand.
I shall wear the costume I wore when I played Othello the Moor, which no doubt will be taken for that of a Caliphate terrorist, and the sword I shall use will be a scimitar, which I shall plunge into the royal breast before I detonate the explosives under my robes. It should bring on the long-awaited war. Thus will I remind the world of the sovereign power of an act of live theater.
And my last line on the stage will be that declaimed in like manner by a scion of a noble theatrical family whose name yet lives for the ages. Not that of the great Edwin but that of his otherwise mediocre brother. John Wilkes Booth.
“Sic semper tyrannus!”
Ivory Tower
BRUCE STERLING
Bruce Sterling studied at the University of Texas, Austin, where he became involved with a group of other science fiction fans and writers who called themselves the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, and with their encouragement began writing science fiction seriously. In 1976 he graduated with a degree in journalism and sold his first science fiction story, “Man-Made Self.” His first novel, Involution Ocean, was published the following year. His 1985 novel, Schismatrix, heralded the cyberpunk movement in which he became one of the most prominent voices: in 1986 he edited the seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades. Sterling recently finished a stint as “visionary in residence” at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He is married to Serbian author and filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic and lives in Belgrade.
Our problem was simple. We needed an academy, but professional careers in conventional science were out of the question for us. We were ten thousand physicists, entirely self-educated on the Internet.
Frankly, physics is a lot easier to learn than physicists used to let on. The ultimate size of the smallest particles, the origin and fate of the Universe—come on, who could fail to take a burning interest in those subjects? If we were genuinely civilized, that’s all we would talk about. In the new world of open access, ultrawide broadband, and gigantic storage banks, physics is just sort of sitting there. It’s like a vast intellectual Tinkertoy! We cranky net-geeks had to find a way to devote every waking moment to our overpowering lust for physics. Of course, we demanded state support for our research efforts (just like real scientists do) but, alas, the bureaucrats wouldn’t give us the time of day.
So to find time for our kind of science, we had to dump a few shibboleths. For instance, we never bother to “publish”: we just post our findings on weblogs, and if they get a lot of links, hey, we’re the Most Frequently Cited. Tenure? Who needs that? Never heard of it! Doctorates, degrees, defending a thesis—don’t know, don’t need ’em, can’t even be bothered!
Organizing ourselves was a snap. If you are a math genius whose primary language is Malayalam and whose main enthusiasm is wave-particle duality, you stand out on the net like a buzzing hornet in a spiderweb. You’re one in a million, pal—but in a world of ten billion people, there’s ten thousand of us. We immediately started swapping everything we knew on collaborative weblogs.
As most of us were Indian and/or Chinese (most of everybody is Indian and/or Chinese) we established our Autodidacts’ Academy on the sun-baked, sandstone flats of the desert of Rajasthan, not too far from the deserted Mughal utopia of Fatehpur Sikri. We were dreamy, workaholic utopians trying to wrest a living out of barren wilderness. Something like Mormons, basically. However, as it was the 2050s, we also had unlimited processing power, bandwidth, search engines, social software, and open-source everything. How could we fail?
Basically, we recast human existence as a bioengineering problem. How do you move enough nutrient through human brain tissue to allow an entire city of people to blissfully contemplate supersymmetric M-branes? The solutions were already scattered through the online technical literature; we just Googled it all up and set it to work. Our energy is solar; water is distilled and recycled; and the ivory gleaming domes and spires of our physics ashram are computer-fabricated grit, glue, and sawdust. All our lab equipment is made of garbage.
Our visitors are astounded to see (for instance) repurposed robotic vacuum cleaners equipped with tiller blades digging out our 150-kilometer accelerator tunnel. But why not? In the 2050s, even the junk is ultra-advanced, and nobody knows how to repair it. Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
Our daily diet, which is free of charge, is fully defined Physicist Chow. It’s basically sewage, with its bioenergetic potential restored by genetically altered yeasts. Some diners fail to appreciate the elegant mathematical simplicity of this solution to the age-old problem of a free lunch. But if they don’t get it, then they don’t belong here with us, anyway.
There’s no money and no banking here. Instead, every object is tracked by RFID tags and subjected to a bioenergetic, cost-benefit, eBay-style arbitrage by repurposed stock-market buy-sell software agents. In practice, this means that when you need something new, you just pile up the things you don’t want by your doorway until somebody shows up and gives you the thing you do want. Economists who visit here just flee screaming—but come on, was economics ever really a “science”? We’re with Rutherford: it’s physics or it’s stamp collecting!
You might imagine that women would find our monastic, geeky life unattractive, but our academy’s crawling with coeds. A few are female physicists—the usual proportion—but the rest are poets, lit. majors, anthropologists, and gender studies mavens. These gals showed up to condemn our reductionalist, instrumental male values, but they swiftly found out that our home is ideal for consciousness-raising encounter groups and performance art. So women now outnumber us three to two. That’s not a problem. We don’t bother them with our weird obsessions, they don’t bother us with theirs, and whatever happens between us after dark is nobody’s business.
We have a beautiful, spiritual thing going on here. Feel free to join us. Please, no more atomic-bomb fans. We know that atomic bombs are a dead simple, hundred-year-old technology. Anybody with a search engine, half a brain, and a lot of time can tinker one up. But really, why even bother? It’s beneath us!
Play It Again, Psam
IAN STEWART
Ian Stewart is Professor of Mathematics at University of Warwick, United Kingdom, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and author of more than 160 research papers. He is also a prolific author of popular books and magazine articles on mathematics and science, either on his own or with Jack Cohen. He and Cohen collaborated on SF novels Wheelers and Heaven, and with Terry Pratchett on the Science of Discworld books. His Web site can be found at http://freespace.virgin.net/ianstewart.joat/index.htm.
To: wilkinson553@btespernet.com
From: ericjones@newpsientist.co.uk
Subject: party invitation
Charlie: hi.
I’ll get to the invitation in a minute—
Well done! I’m not Eric Jones, and I congratulate you on how quickly you worked that out. Though you haven’t yet understood that in a sense I am Eric Jones—or, at least, one small part of me is. (Hi, Charlie! Welcome to the party!)
I know what you’re thinking—in a very literal sense, actually. You’re wondering how I penetrated your mindshield. And I know that you’re trying desperately to disconnect me by switching off the power to your computer. It won’t work, Charlie. I’ve overridden your motor control areas, and right now you’re totally paralyzed.
Ah, now you see the danger. Far too late, I’m afraid.
It all seemed such a good idea, didn’t it? Controlling your computer by the power of your mind? It never occurred to you that it might cut both ways. The adverts play up the advantages of installing a “telepathic interface,” don’t they? They tell you that it will endow your mind with ESP, psi, supernatural powers, whatever. So, like everyone else, you had an Extel neurochip implanted in your brain, connecting you to the Espernet.
It’s clever technology. True telepathy—direct transfer of thoughts from brain to brain—simply can’t work, because everyone’s brain is wired up differently. There’s no common format for thoughts. So the engineers invented one. The Extel chip samples the sender’s cognitive wavefunction and uses one of the standard cognitive conversion protocols to encode it as a matrix of neural qubits. The matrix can then be transmitted like any other item of quantum cryptography. The recipient’s embedded neurochip transforms the matrix back into a cognitive wavefunction that is compatible with the architecture of their brain. Exchanging messages may feel like thought transference, but a lot gets lost in translation.
And a lot can be slipped in without being noticed.
They don’t tell you about the downside, do they, Charlie? What the adverts don’t mention is that as soon as you hook your brain up to the Espernet, anyone who can hack the net can hack straight into your mind. Not just to read it; to control it. Like I’m doing.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I feel like it. I guess I like to gloat. Anyway, it won’t do you the slightest good to know.
Still worrying about your mindshield? Oh, dear. You really got taken for a ride there. You’d be surprised at just how much psionic spam gets through commercial psam filters. They’re OK for deleting unwanted offers of Psiagra or Psialis, but they’re much too simpleminded to keep me out.
